Agile stuff like this just reeks of micro-management to me. To add insult to injury I recall one presenter at an Agile conference a few years ago explain how they added a "delta" value to their velocity so they could also report on the rate of change of their rate of change... Funnily enough they stopped short of just calling it "acceleration". Ugh though.

I have yet to see this type of process and measurement add value or productivity to a project. But perhaps that's just my experience.

Yeah. My old group at Microsoft started doing "agile" and it just turned into a micromanagement field day, with PMs and middle management in meetings examining charts and calling people on the carpet for missing their estimates.

Look, they're estimates . . . often made by other people than the ones doing the work.

(Oh, and having the build break for two or three weeks running didn't help the "estimates" very much. A culture of build breaking just rewards the people who are less careful than others).

I finally got the PM on our project to call our scrum meetings "status meetings" instead, because that's exactly what they were. Status for rollup into the Great Burndown Chart.

Over two years out of that garbage and I'm still bitter.

When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

Agile means doing it your own way. It means customizing what works for the team and the particular tasks.

Scrum is a fixed methodology with a rulebook.

(A lot of time "Agile" gets used to mean "Scrum" but the two aren't the same, or even the same kind of thing, though the Scrum Book is an often not-unreasonable starting point for an agile organization.)

> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

Every team/company has their own take on Agile, copying what other successful teams do verbatim doesn't necessarily work. There are objectively many wrong ways to do Agile (your above example being one) but not any single "correct" way.

Have you been on a team that has added productivity? Note that most teams get more done by adding labour, but that is not increasing productivity. Rather, getting more or better output per labour hour.

Then, how did you know where to focus effort to improve? And that you've increased productivity? Were the teams relying on improving tools, improving practice, and in what mix?

The basic problem is, there are good ways to run teams and bad ways to run teams, but the good ways in general are organic, contextual, intersubjective. It's hard to distill down to bullet points, much less a damn chart.

The most productive teams are the ones that focus on good people doing good honest work, being fairly rewarded, having a meaningful separation/delegation of responsibility/authority, communication, a knowledge of when to gather data and optimize against it and when not to, etc.

So, any time you try to distill team productivity on this cooperative creative endeavor into some number that you're going to put on a chart and give people shit about, you've already lost. If you don't already have a sense of how productive your team is and what the obstacles to increasing that are, chances are you're just a suit and you need to have someone else to run the team.

I run most of my projects under an organization so this doesn't really work. Also stars aren't really a great measure of anything after a point. Perfect example are the json-jwt and ruby-jwt gems. The latter gets more stars because it is arguably easier for people to find even though the former is a far more complete and robust implementation of the JWT spec.

Same here. I contribute a large part of my OS time at the moment to CakePHP projects - under an org - and Dokku - under another person's username. Everytime I see a site that ranks developers based on github profiles, I cringe a bit.

On that note, I'm apparently the 3rd top PHP developer in NYC. That strikes me as a bit odd, as Phil Sturgeon is also in the area. I guess they don't count "Bristol & Brooklyn" as NYC :)

We're trying to bridge the gap between private repos and public profiles. Nobody sees the work you put into your org-repos, but that work can still be shown on our leaderboard at https://wakatime.com/leaders

Oh got it. The good thing is WakaTime tracks the time you spent coding independently of the repo. We just use your repo when cross-referencing time spent per commit, but your public profile is populated even if you never use version control.

My wife and I are co-founders and we have a 3 year-old daughter. Our startup is also still in its early stages, so things are pretty busy and often chaotic. I can definitely say that, as a necessity, we've become much better at time management than we ever were before.

Our days are fairly planned and we try to keep things routine as much as possible, consistency helps immensely. Also we've managed to ensure everything we need is fairly close by. We live about 10-15 minutes from work and our daycare and gym are both in close proximity to our office. We each typically have two scheduled mornings a week to hit the gym, one of us goes to the gym and the other deals with daycare. We also occasionally hand off daycare pick-up to allow the other to work a bit later. In fact, we hand-off on a lot of things to make everything work, particularly meetings, typically only one of us will go so the other can stay at work and grind on other things. As a software developer this is pretty important, I can skip out of a lot of meetings and keep working on product and we can catch up on what happened in the evening.

Having a child means our days need to be somewhat time-boxed so there's little room for severely late work hours. I actually believe this to be a good thing, as I'm forced to get the most out of my work time and continue to improve on my time management skills. That said, we're often catching up on things during downtime, weekends, evenings and since we live together, we have the advantage (or disadvantage depending on how you look at it) of being able to discuss work whenever we need to. To make things even more interesting my brother and father work in a related business, so family dinners can be... interesting.

Outside of that we try to keep everything pretty normal and we enjoy our downtime. We like to cook a lot, we make a regular trip to the market most Saturdays with our daughter. We cook dinner with our daughter often and eat at home often which provides valuable family time. The grandparents usually watch our daughter on Friday nights so we can hang out of with friends once a week as well, and we occasionally sneak out to have a drink together, after her bed-time, while they stay and watch her.

Almost all of our family lives nearby, so my parents and her parents help out a lot. It really starts to become a team effort to make everything work out without an excessive level of stress. I can't stress enough how important family is when things get to this level of "busy".

Like most people here, we love what we do. We don't mind being somewhat "always on" and we try to plan our lives in a way the reminds us to do other things too and not to neglect family and friends. That's the bigger challenge I think, not figuring out how to work hard at something you love, but remembering to live your life too.

Overall, we are very fortunate things have worked out as well as they have.

I'm also married to my cofounder and the experience is a lot like yours... Startup families are very tight:)
Some people say "startup is a contact sport" but we prefer "startup is a team sport". Keep being grateful and good luck!

I wonder how many of your neighbours feel the same as you. I wonder, if after seeing your kids play in the front yard, how many would respond in kind, letting their kids outside to play with yours, assuming that if one parent was willing then they wouldn't feel so guilty about it.

I suppose we just don't live in that kind of world anymore. I used to play the suburbs with other kids, we were rarely in the backyard, going around on the cul-de-sac and the windy roads of suburbia. By the time I was about 10 or 11 I had biked across the entire city.

My daughter is 3, we live in the city, but there are kids. The roads are busier and the neighbourhood more crowded with more cars now. I'm not sure if I'll have the same attitude. Funnily as grandparents even my parents seem much more reluctant, and worried about my daughter than they were about us.

Where is the evidence presented that supports any of these claims? I realize most of the seem like common sense but as far as I know many are in fact false. In particular, the argument about semantic markup seems pretty dubious. Currently, I'm not aware of any search engine that cares about new HTML5 semantic tags.

On that note, is there even even one example of assistive technology that uses semantic markup? As I understand it ARIA tags are needed for this, semantic markup is irrelevant since most (all?) assistive technology is outdated as far as browser technology goes.

I'm with you on moving back to Linux, having sufficient experience with both I'm loathe to move back for both hardware and software envrionment frustrations. I do have hope that things will get better on that side of the fence, but OSX would have to become pretty terrible for me to do that anytime soon (though they seem to really be pushing their luck lately).

The Sager for years has been a terrible computer due to the WIFI support. It was crappy in Windows and worse in Linux. I actually looked forward to getting the MBP. Recently, however, I found a guy's opensource driver for the RealTek WIFI. This is more stable than the actual official driver. His blog post was great about how to install it. Now I've got two computer to compare.

OSX is apparently terrible at memory management. Running Eclipse and like 10 tabs in FF can cause the system to swap. On the SSD I loath the very concept. Some of my comments on HN about Light Table stem from the fact that LT uses .5 GB of memory when everything is said and done (node helpers, etc). LT on OS X ran great, but OS X would swap. Running multiple VirtualBox instances made it worse. I tend to run about 260-350 MB of swap if not more for a few small programs.

Cut to Ubuntu. Once I got use to Unity I liked Ubuntu. The OS is smooth, use-able and well-supported both at a community level and from a system update perspective. I can run a 2 GB Arango VM, and 3 Hadoop VMs at once all nicely networked to each other via host-only. FF with the same 10-ish tabs running with lein REPL and Counterclockwise (Eclipse IDE for Clojure) and still only use 76 KB of swap.

Now aside from following a few steps about getting the WIFI to work, I've not really done much Ubuntu customization. I haven't had to. I installed it, it worked, I worked.

OS X had some nice ideas, but, IMHO, Linux caught up. The terminals available with Linux are better than the default terminal with OS X. They are more memory efficient than Console 2. Unity works well. I actually have muscle memory trying to work with OS X as I do Unity.

I will grant that the OS X laptop is light years ahead of my Linux box's battery. Even when the battery was new, the Linux laptop was lucky to get 2.5 hours. The OS X laptop gets 5 hrs or so under my daily load.

Interestingly, the only laptop of the 5 or so I've owned to have a dead pixel is the MBP. Under white backgrounds it's easy to miss. On dark backgrounds I'm annoyed.

I don't have personal experience since my MBP has a SSD. Things page fairly quickly. It will affect the total life expectancy of the drive. With the new models of MBP that's a real problem. The drive and it's logic board have to be replaced. This will require me to pay a "Genius" to do that. Ideally I could just pop a few screws and be done.

SSD lifespan concerns are overdone. Tech report took 100TB of constant writing to get a TLC SSD to start showing errors, and you're not likely to do that. However, by avoiding swap, you're in all likelihood causing extra reads, which also degrade performance. I advise saving your worry for other aspects, such as reliability during unexpected power loss.

Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the call. This is completely unacceptable behavior and a feature like this should have never been released unless it was exceptionally reliable and seamless.

It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore.

One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.

The phone thing was infuriating. After upgrading all of a sudden every device I own would start ringing like crazy: phone, computer, Apple TV STOPS airplay because the iPad streaming to it was also buzzing like mad. I KNOW I KNOW, you can turn it off, but I hate the fact that upgrading my OS has now become "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity", especially because after I pick up the call I completely forget about it (I'm not going to not take the call and then start going through the prefs on my x devices). So the other day I finally gave in and just hit accept on my computer -- and ... call failed. Great. I felt like I was on candid camera or something, the employees at Apple viewing me through my iSight camera on my monitor laughing at the sucker who finally took the bait.

As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.

All of the features you've just canned, I use regularly, and don't see the huge issue that you're talking about. I receive calls on my laptop daily and I've very rarely had it fail. I find being able to reply to texts and calls insanely useful. Regardless of my anecdote all new technology is prone to bugs. To say "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity" is ridiculous. The feature you're talking about is Handoff, its 1 checkbox in your device. Airplay not working? I use it regularly again, with Plex and Beamer, its one of the most useful things I have connected. You say its ruined through software updates, but then go on to say that your gripe is the interaction interface? And of all things, scrolling. Wouldn't that be a pre-existing condition?

I feel like your frustration could be solved with just simply setting up your devices in a way that suits your uses, not the common denominator.

If Yosemite, iOS 8 and other recent changes have shown anything, it is that that problems are not consistent across the user base -- some users are plagued by bugs, while others are somehow, inexplicably completely problem-free.

I myself have been hit hard by Yosemite bugs (graphics glitches, slowness, wifi not connecting at all, very slow wifi, Mac not coming out of sleep, AirPlay issues, Airdrop issues, Bluetooth suddenly disappearing etc., all this on a fast, fairly new MBP), but I have never experienced any iOS 8 bugs of note.

The corollary is that when someone complains, we need to take it seriously and not pretend everything is fine. Clearly many people are hit by problems, and the problems are very real.

Similar story here, and I don't even bother complaining anymore. The product is perfect. My fault, that Wifi doesn't finds no APs (fixed now in Yosemite), Bluetooth works occasionally (better in Yosemite, not up to par with competition), camera works once in Skype + next time after reboot (still happens) and audio stutters (still happens, but not as bad as in Mavericks). Oh, and don't get me started on the power brick cable quality [1]... Neither Apple or user forums care, the posts just get deleted. Whatever. My next laptop won't have a fruity logo. I need something that Just Works. Like Macbooks once were.

My next laptop won't have a fruity logo. I need something that Just Works.

I'm right there with you, but the trouble is, I'm not sure anything satisfies that criteria any more. :-(

Not so long ago, I was expecting to go the other way, with our next laptops here having that fruity logo precisely because we expected OS X to Just Work where Windows 8 was just nasty.

However, right now, neither of the major commercial platforms is at all appealing, and anything Linux-based still has the fundamental problem that there aren't enough professional quality applications available to meet our needs yet. Relying on SaaS to break the OS strangleholds is also a questionable business move that we are increasingly glad we haven't made as the stories of broken "upgrades", sharp price increases, and outright cancelled services pile up.

I'm holding out some hope that either MS will come back with the next version of Windows and promote some sort of very-long-term stability and support (which is something they have historically been good at, but it seems unlikely with their new choice of leadership) or the FOSS work will finally start to take over (but this probably requires changes in the law, specifically making clear that patents are not enforceable anywhere that matters on things used for interoperability like data formats, communications protocols, and algorithms necessary to work with them).

>If Yosemite, iOS 8 and other recent changes have shown anything, it is that that problems are not consistent across the user base -- some users are plagued by bugs, while others are somehow, inexplicably completely problem-free.

Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.

It's true that there are plenty of possible explanations, but whether those explanations should still be possible as we head into 2015 is a different question.

Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.

This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.

I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.

If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.

The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.

>Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.

Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.

It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...

I honestly don't think it was ever as bad in those days as what we're seeing now, though, with the possible exception of high-end games where poor quality graphics drivers were notorious for causing crashes for a while (and still are, to some extent).

The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.

Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.

> You say its ruined through software updates, but then go on to say that your gripe is the interaction interface?

Yeah, imagine that, multiple complaints: 1. Software updates made Apple TV AirPlay incredibly unreliable for me. And its not just me, lots of people have had this happen. I btw still think Airplay is a stellar feature and if it ever got fixed it would continue to make me stick with Apple TV. 2. The UI sucks:...

> And of all things, scrolling.

Navigating episodes/content/movies/whatever on the Apple TV is a very bad experience. Its hard to explain without first using a good experience. On Apple TV, if I'm on the last episode of a show on Season 1 that I own, getting to episode 1 of Season 2 which I don't yet own is very difficult. I have to go all the way up to "more on iTunes", then choose a season, then get to that episode. On Amazon Fire TV, its just the next episode on the list. Apple TV also strangely sorts episodes you don't own earliest to latest, but episodes you DO own latest to earliest. If I go to purchased Tv shows > all, I have no idea what the sort order is. I think it might be most recent, but then the very first show on the list I bought over a year ago, so that can't be it. And as far as I can tell I can't search the purchased section anyways, so I have to literally scroll down some non-alphabetical list of 220 shows in my case if there's a show I'm pretty sure I bought but I can't quite remember the exact name. I'm not sure how to properly describe this mess, which is why I just said "scrolling", because thats what the experience feels like on the Amazon Fire TV: you just scroll through content and don't find yourself endlessly going in and out of menu "sections". It sounds to me that you don't use the actual Apple TV UI but instead use Plex (on a jailbroken Apple TV?), which is fine, but it says nothing of the Apple TV experience.

Edit: BTW, your mention of Plex reminded me of another (long overdue) failing of Apple TV. I happen to also use Plex on my Amazon Fire TV. The install process was tapping the voice button on my remote, saying "plex", then selecting install from the app store. The process on Apple TV is either jailbreaking, running an app that pretends to be the the trailers server (which may break on any upgrade of Apple TV) or accessing your plex content somewhere else and airplaying it.

I share the same frustrations, but I guess I've also accepted that I'm not playing by the rules with my setup (especially with Plex). I hope that they do open Apple TV to more development so it isn't as foreign, it has a lot of potential, but seems to not be a focus.

I'm at my wits end with Yosemite. I'm very seriously considering switching to Linux or Windows. Of the numerous problems this OS has, my biggest problem is waking my rMBP from sleep. About 20% of the time, it just doesn't wake up and requires a hard shutdown. I never had that problem with Mountain Lion or Mavericks.

While I'm (we're) critical of the regressions when it comes to UI performance, switching to linux means giving up an entire ecosystem of apps, completely changing workflows, and in some cases depending on the kind of development that one does, making our jobs impossible.

So much this. I've settled on elementaryOS 0.2 (based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) for all my development, staging, and production environments, being netbook, notebook, All-in-One desktop, Mac mini and all my VPS servers. Software package consistency is a invaluable, and you don't even have to give up on the looks:

Arch Linux + Pantheon DE was very buggy the last I checked. I ended up just installing ElementaryOS and regretting/missing having pacman. After a while I just gave up on eOS Luna and switched back to Arch Linux with a very minimally themed Cinnamon DE.

So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.

Same here. I installed Fedora 21 and dwm as the window manager. I didn't know this computer could be this fast (2010 MacBook Air). The bad thing is the battery duration, which is significantly worse than Mavericks (but approximately the same as Yosemite... I got around 5-6 hours of battery life with Mavericks, 3-4 hours with Yosemite and Linux).

I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.

My (March 2011) MBP with an SSD booted Snow Leopard in about 7-8 seconds from the bong sound to the complete desktop... My current (September 2014) MBP takes so much longer (just under Mavericks, haven't gone to Yosemite yet)... I find this disappointing.. not being able to upgrade the ram doubly so.

This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.

Yosemite must be bad if you found Ubuntu good. I constantly get "a problem has been detected" messages whenever I boot. Got Manjaro (a user friendly Arch spin off) on my other laptop. Way less problematic and XFCE behaves predictably.

Same with me. Before upgrading I always used to close the lid to make my macbook to sleep. The wake-up experience was good. But after upgrading, after waking up the system becomes too slow to use. I have to restart. So stopped putting my mac book pro to sleep. Now I always have to shut down when not using. Apart from sleep-wakeup problem, in general this has become much slower compared to mavericks

Probably this could be related to hardware config. I have a mac book pro at work with 8GB ram and it works fine. My personal mac book pro has 4GB ram and it has problem.

I had this issue too with non-waking up from sleep. Somehow the problem dissapeared after I upgraded the HDD to SSD. Now everything is working fine. Nonetheless, I'm still on Mavericks, no Yosemite upgrade yet. Just a potential solution to your sleep problem.

The file manager (gnautilus) is now called "files". The video player (totem) is now called "videos". This is so obviously broken for people who are trying to web-search for answers to problems that they're having.

Whats worse os that the renaming is inconsistent - software will get one name in the menu, another name in the help > about, and another name on the Internet.

Gnome - and I say this as politely as I can - makes me fucking hate using a computer.

Sure. But for now only Fedora 21 and ArchLinux actually release this in their official package repository because they're both very upstreamy Linux distros. You won't be able to install this without fiddling with PPAs in Debian or Ubuntu.

Gnome 3.14 appears to be the default desktop environment in Debian Unstable. Unstable is subject to change and occasionally things stop working for a bit but many people find it acceptable for non-critical use.

My office recently started using Keynote for a lot of our presentations. Keynote presentations created on the version that is compatible with Yosemite (and nothing prior) cannot be opened on earlier versions.

Even if security updates still come for what...usually 20-30 months with Apple...they still don't care about any other kind of backward compatibility and happily break their own file formats at will.

Apple provides security updates back somewhere between 36 and 44 months for the OS. Unfortunately, you won't know until they announce some exploit and don't patch your OS if you've been left behind or not.

Obviously any one person's experience is only anecdotal, but I'm still waiting to discover that anyone I know in real life actually likes iOS since v7. However, I seem to know plenty of people who wish they hadn't upgraded, or even who returned a new iPad with a recent iOS because they thought they were getting what they'd seen before (iOS 5/6 generation tablets that friends/family had) and hated the new one so much.

Personally, we're still pre-v7 on our iPad here, after reading way too many reviews about severe performance drops on this device after the "upgrade" and learning that there is no way to go back once you've done it. We literally ignore any updates for the system from Apple and just carry on happily enjoying the product as we bought it, making us almost uniquely satisfied among iPad purchasers we know.

My own experience of Yosemite has been the polar opposite of many here; better stability, faster, longer battery life etc. All on a 2011 MacBook Air. I never had any kind of issue with iOS 7 either. The odd reset over the last year on my iPhone 5, but the significant majority of the time (99% at least) it worked and it worked well. Sorry to rock your world view, but have you at least posited that these people vociferously complaining are not representative of the whole? Ditto iOS? I know you will chalk me up as another "fanboy"...

It has nothing to do with Jobs, there were plenty of bugs and other problems during his reign, too. So much that, in fact, it was an axiom for tech minded people not to install any new versions of the OS until at least 10.X.1 version.

Answering calls on my Mac is one of my favorite new features. When it works, it works well. When it doesn't work, it fails upfront. You really have to play with your icloud and FaceTime settings to trick it into working. It's absurd how complicated the whole relationship between iCloud, FaceTime, iMessages, and my devices is. The settings need to be perfect for things to work correctly. I can't even imagine if it was someone who wasn't tech-savvy trying to use these features.

One major drawback for me is a constant flickering in Intellij Idea and Emacs. I'm not sure who is responsible for this, but user experience is just terrible. I'll definitely downgrade to 10.9 when I'll have enough spare time.

I didn't see much problems besides it. I like new design, animations are smooth enough for me and everything works well enough.

I noticed the same flickering in PyCharm (Python flavored Intellij Idea). I hadn't realized it started after upgrading to Yosemite but it makes sense now. I had assumed it was caused by upgrading to PyCharm 4.0 from 3.x.

I could not agree more with your frustrations and observations luciferre, I do hope someone out there from Apple will spot the concerns raised here and take them more seriously than those reported as bugs.

I answer my mobile from my iMac regularly without issues. I don't have the 'continuity' feature due to Apple's choice to block old iMacs (mine is a late-08 model), other than that, it's a bit slower at app-launching but I didn't had any major issues.

this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)

It's a little less clear than that, unfortunately. Apple chose to not support third-party Bluetooth LE dongles, which might be a reasonable engineering limitation. However, if you upgrade your Mac with a BT-LE capable board used by other Continuity-capable Macs, you still can't use Continuity by default; you need to patch some kexts and disable kernel kext signing[1].

It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.

Windows doesnt really have licensing issues. You call a phone number, tell them you want to activate windows, read them a number, and a machine reads you a number. It takes about 6 minutes of your life, and Microsoft always activates when you ask.

For example, if you buy Windows 8.1 you have downgrade rights to every earlier version. All you do is speak with a person, say "I would like to activate windows" and they say ok. Its not a hassle unless you do it daily.

As a counter argument, Apple fans are always telling me "just go to the genius bar, they'll sort it out". As if that isn't a hassle. I've never had the need to take any of my windows machines in to be serviced.

I do regret upgrading. My wireless trackball and mice no longer work smoothly and this is a known problem apparently with RF and bluetooth pointing devices. It's one thing to make things slower or for new features to be buggy, but making the system unusable is unacceptable, IMO. I'm looking at dual booting Linux now and possibly making the switch back. The only reason I haven't yet is because I luckily still have wired versions of the same trackball.

Mavericks and Yosemite have broken Finders and some major crashing problems. Lion was also pretty horrible. I wish Apple would do another "Snow Leopard" so we can get back to a stable system. Yosemite also has some weird issues with SMB connections to servers.

I've always thought of Apple as a marketing company that happens to sell technology, and not a technology company that sells through marketing.

Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.

I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns

A marketing company that happens to sell technology would be selling some sort of standard solution. As Apple develops everything from their protocols to chips to operating systems to complete devices in house... I'd say they're a technology company who also takes marketing very seriously.

They design their own CPUs, displays, operating systems, consumer and professional applications, connectors, development tools and languages, desktops, laptops and mobile devices in house.

Which company would you say has a greater engineering footprint across technologies and business sectors than Apple? There are a few tech companies that actually do one or two things that Apple doesn't, but I can't think of any that do everything that Apple does.

>One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.

Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.

When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.

You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.

I've noticed a lot of, relatively minor, inconsistencies since switching to flex-box. It definitely takes a while to adjust to them and iron them all out. At this point, now that it's working, I've mostly forgotten what the quirks were.

But I agree with the author, there was a lot of trial and error moments to get the layouts we wanted working across browsers, and even then there were some unexplainable quirks that we just couldn't figure out and had to back away from and take different approaches.

IE, as usual, seemed to have the biggest issues. I recall that one issue was it didn't behave consistently if you left out the flex-basis value. So instead of `flex: 1`, you would find that fully specifying `flex: 1 1 auto` would behave more consistently in certain situations.